ronald baatz | devouring birds

Editor’s Note: Access, accountability, attention… What is it about those writers who speak to us and those to whom we turn a deaf ear…because those who speak to us are what they write, are what we need to know (more) about ourselves? Only they open that door. Invite us immediately into their home, their heart, their life.

“I cannot read Williams tonight, but I can read Para.” I’m hooked immediately, knowing Williams, knowing Para…wondering where the hell is Baatz going with that line? With Para in particular? “Williams seems like a stranger while Para is like/a friend who has come to drink and spend the night.” Well, you gotta love that. … “But tonight I want to listen to Parra talk about being an old man./… “Should an old man living alone/have a dog?/Should the dog be old also? Would it be better if/the dog were to die first?…”

This is his BIG book (maybe Baatz’s biggest). 155 pages, New and Selected Poems. On the upper left-hand corner of very last page sits a tiny, untitled, final poem all by itself:

Orange peels- the shadows of them as I remember the shadows of them curling in childhood.

“curling” …brilliant. No poem without it.

Welcome (back) to Baatz’s world. A world of curling orange peels, of parents shuffling into the surrealism of age (the poet but a few steps behind)…of loneliness, birds, dogs, sheep, friends, world famous writers, artists, musicians who sustain a poet’s own words, women who come and go like Michelangelo…

Oh, hell. Open the door yourself. I’m still stuck in Baatz’s desert where I always thought I would find myself at the very end. — Norbert Blei

MOVING TO THE DESERT

I cannot live here when I am old. It is too cold for many months out of the year. As it is, I am having a rough time dealing with the cold now. When I am old I want to live in the desert. I suppose this is a common goal for people who live in the cold. Although, thankfully, this past winter was a blessing, so unbelievably mild was it. The morning newspaper explains why there is such an abundance of yellowjackets. I was stung recently. I was sitting on the green lawn chair at the back of the house, minding my own business, reading, when suddenly I felt an itch on my leg. As I scratched this itch, one of these yellowjackets let me have it. It had managed to crawl up my leg, underneath my pants. After stinging me it fell to the ground and walked away; for some reason not flying, perhaps too exhausted from having stung me. My first instinct was to kill it; instead I just moved away from it. I will leave these heavenly purple mountains to the bugs and the bears and whatever else wants to claim them as their own. I do not want to be exposed to such cold when I am old. I want to bake in the sun. I want to be like a dried fig. If I had money, then living here would not be such a hardship. I’d be able to defend myself from the cold with money. But there is none, and there appears to be nothing I can do to rectify this problem. I live where the winters are harsh and I have no way of keeping myself warm. I am profoundly disappointed in myself. I will not even have the money necessary to move to the desert when the time comes. So why do I even talk about it, dream about it. I have been pathetic at creating a decent income. I will die in this lousy cold. I can see it all now: when I die others will come to take my body away, my belongings. They will make a thorough search of my room for money that I might have hidden away, and they will find not a dime. Then they will unearth thousands of poems, and they will know why.

READING MARQUEZ

I find it is a good time in my life to be reading the autobiography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. When Marquez was a child he was able to gain the attention of adults by telling stories in which he greatly distorted the details. As an adult he carried this lovely habit into the writing of his books, even when it came time to tell the story of his life. The beautiful, magical occurrences that take place in this telling make it easier for me to accept the horrors of Alzheimer’s that plague my father. His twisted, misshapen memories, his hallucinations, his forgetting from one moment to the next, his face contorting with fear; all this seems slightly more bearable to me when I feel like a fish at the bottom of the sea looking up at the stars crying in their infancy. Unfortunately, Marquez is of no help whatsoever to my mother. His disease might be the death of her before it is the death of him. The amount of patience needed to interact with my father is almost too much to ask of a person. Yesterday she ended up in the bank crying to a teller. Crying in public is becoming more and more frequent for her. She doesn’t know from one day to the next what awaits her. It’s questionable whether we will have a birthday party for him this summer. Would he be able to play the role of a birthday person with even a stitch of understanding and joyfulness? Would he recognize who came to the party to celebrate his being ninety years old? Would everyone appear as a dangerous stranger? Would the gathering cause him to be capsized in dark bewilderment and sorrow? But, he has always said that he wanted to live to be one hundred. Now this miraculous event might indeed come to pass, at least in his head, since when he last spoke of the subject he proclaimed that he will be one hundred on his next birthday. And if he recognizes not a soul at the party, then it will no doubt feel to him as though he has lived “a hundred years of solitude.”

A MORNING IN APRIL

I meet my mother at the lawyer’s office in town. We thought it best to talk about my being given health care proxy and power of attorney for my father without him initially being present. The lawyer’s on Main Street. He has new shoes. He is a very quiet and accommodating man with overly bushy eyebrows that might crawl off his forehead at any second. His secretary, the older one, performs all the small talk about the weather. The younger is obsessed with eating a bowl of frosted flakes. We are in there for a very long half an hour, charged one hundred dollars which I find cheap. Afterwards, I suggest to my mother that we have coffee together, but she says she should get back to the house as soon as possible since my father is being looked after by a neighbor. So, crossing the street, I walk her to her car. She holds onto my hand. Her hand is the hand of a woman in her eighties. It is diminished and bony but still capable of being firm. She was an exceptionally beautiful woman. Still is. I was always so proud of the fact, when I was a kid, of just how beautiful my mother was. Naturally enough, I could never understand how my father had managed to actually have this woman in his life. I lived with the suspicions that he could read such thoughts in my eyes. But, I’m well aware of the fact that their love endures on a level I may never know. I feel like weeping right here in the street. I help her into her car. She makes a u-turn and drives off in the direction rain is coming from. I stand there, rooted in front of a closed movie theater in a decaying town that lies between a river and a creek. It is a morning in April. At some point Alzheimer’s could force us to put my father in a nursing home. I don’t talk to my mother about this too much. We know the possibility exists. I dread the day when I’ll be responsible for separating them. It will be like tearing the wings off a bird and throwing them up in the air and expecting them to fly.

SHE LOVED MOZART

There’s a sadness to it, of course, my becoming more and more isolated from the world. I remember, years ago, when I was living at the motel, there was this woman who used to come and go, sometimes staying for months at a time. Every so often I’d go over to her room, sit around, and talk with her. The room would smell from clove cigarettes and dirty wash. Over the lampshades pieces of clothing were draped, to bring the light down to the most remarkable dimness. This light never failed to charm and attract me, as a moth would be attracted to a bright light (although, I suppose moths are drawn to dim light also). Anyway, I find myself steadily becoming increasingly like this woman, and it’s not always the most comfortable realization. Although, I cannot say that I am living with dirty wash. No, this I cannot admit to. If anything, I’m fanatical about washing clothes. My clothing has worn thin, not from my wearing it but from the continuous washings. But, my god, like this woman I’m letting the house go dark. She died at the motel, from cancer. Some nights I’d see her crossing the parking lot, meager flesh on her bones, and she’d knock on my door and she’d ask me to play Mozart on my stereo set. She loved Mozart. In her youth she had been a very promising violist, but injury and shock from a fire had made her a ghost of her old talent, her old self. I used to feed her also, the miniscule amount she was capable of eating. She loved sharing a thin sandwich as much as she loved Mozart. I told her it takes a lot of solitude to write a poem. She told me it takes a lot of solitude to die.

other Norbert Blei web pages

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The coop has flown

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Norbert Blei | 1935 – 2013

On the back roads of Door County again

Norbert Blei – 2012

Photo by Bobbie Krinsky

Norbert Blei – 2012

Photo by Jeffrey Winke

Norbert Blei – 2011

Photo by Sharon Auberle

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